Nice work, I'll look at adding them another time though as my cheat utils depend on each <action> being opened and closed on the same line, which I guess is a throwback to using my own code rather than standard XML libraries.

Changing the utils is probably a smaller job than changing the XMLs but I'm midst adding some features to the utils to help with MESS cheat files and don't want to risk breaking other stuff.

These now remove the HUD for the sf2 games, sfa, dstlk, nwarr and cybots.

Also, the codes for those plus sfa2 & sfz2al were dropping some desirable sprites, so I took out the minimal amount and left comments telling what stage to pick to avoid the rest. That's why some backdrop select codes are included that were missing or had errors.

Pugsy wrote:Given ROM credits for sets defined as "(parent only)"...any chance of doing the same for the clones for completeness (major PITA I know).

If someone out there wants to get into making ROM codes, this would be a nice starter project.

But they would not get any credit for the cheats, as per cheat.txt:-

As new clones are added I will add the cheats and give credit to theoriginal author for the clones as long as the conversions are relativelystraightforward.

I've never taken a credit for a clone ROM cheat when I didn't find the original cheat and I've added 100s of clones. As it's not actually a cheat just adding the parent is probably more acceptable then if it was an actual Invincibility cheat or whatnot. Don't worry about it if you don't want to, it would be a big job and people who really want the effect for sprite ripping can always use the parent set.

Can these type of codes be done for other games/boards? Because there are already other emulators that disable backgrounds for CPS1,2,3 and Neogeo games, but I would love these kinds of cheats made for those Konami and Taito boards.

Final Burn Alpha can disable CPS3 layers now. It doesn't work quite like the CPS2 and Neogeo games though. But I don't know if it's because of the way CPS3 works or because FBA doesn't do it correctly.

I'm commenting a lot of the background cheats from the 0.153 cheat file out, the use of commas in the action statements is causing MAME to crash intermittently on startup on 64 bit builds with those games. I'll edit them and re-add them as time permits to get rid of the commas. It's proving a major PITA at the moment, I've edited a lot of them but I'm going comma blind so I'm knocking them on the head for the time being.